San Francisco Tsunami

Thursday, August 23, 2012

John Danger Hirsch doesn’t give a fuck about selling out.

Not to Mike, not to Matty, not to me, not to anyone did he ever once say, “Hey, boys, let’s go out this 2012 campaign and focus on winning some integrity awards.”

So Danger doesn’t care that the 2012 Tsunami so completely, so definitively sold out their legacy of Clemente award winners and character guys and poor men’s Jim Abbott’s. He’s fine that management decided their lust for even a blood-stained shot at the ship meant welcoming the likes of clutch-hitting sodomites, known drug abusers, hog-tying perverts, homophobes who like gay people, winking-emoticon junkies, and fifth-grade math teachers.

But this past off-season at the devil’s market wasn’t the end of the story, and it also wasn’t the beginning. So let’s rewind, take our time and do the job right. Let’s.
In the beginning there was the Godfather, and the Godfather wanted to pay baseball. So he did. And he was fucking good. He threw 85 on the mound and scared the shit out of all the batters, most who were half his size. Then he pinched the wrong tail, perhaps a niece of the baseball gods; or maybe he fleeced one of their sons in a card game, maybe in a saloon at the crossroads of Cooperstown and hell; no one knows for certain the dooming deed, but in any case the baseball gods struck down upon his mighty right shoulder and took away 33 mph of his speed. So he gave up the baseball, gave up his love of seeing sawdust in a hitter’s hands and of painting the black with electric guitar.

Then one day the Godfather played catch with a ranging Assyrian, and he saw that, though slowed, his stuff was still moving. He could change speeds with his spinner. He could repeat his delivery. He realized he wanted to play baseball again, gods of the diamond be damned.

So he started a fucking league, named it SFuckingNABA. And he pitched for the Fog. And other teams came and joined this league, SFuckingNABA.

The fifth team to join this league was straightforwardly named Team Five by their straightforward empirical steward, Old Crowe. Crowe didn’t eat meat then or now and he didn’t want any meatheads on his Team Five. He wanted good strong non-religious-Mormon-like ballplayers and he wanted them to be even better citizens off the field than they were players on it. Yes, before you jest, some years this was easier than others, largely due to the quality of performance on Saturdays in Big Rec, not because of any vile acts later those nights.

But Team Five struck gold with a few draft picks and lottery ticket free-agent signings, and by the time the Omahas and Epsteins and Brills and Jake Taylors were in their prime, Old Crowe had decided to call them his Tsunami. Above his bed, in green and black magic marker, he painstakingly (hour after hour for weeks, mind you, laying on his back atop scaffolding just inches from the ceiling) scratched his own Sistine chapel, his Mona Lisa, his vegetarian roar in standard urban-American graffiti font, his battlecry to the entire SFuckingNABA in just two words:

ROLL

TIDE

(this was all long before hash marks#)

And for awhile there were many regular season victories for the Tsunami, even against the Godfather and his off-speed sorcery for the demon Fog. And sometimes there were post-game beers, team bbqs, a golfing day here and there. There was even a game at what they called Pac Bell Park way back then. Ooh-ooh, and let’s not forget: there was a hot girl! Mel. She played right field. Didn’t hit so much. But cute! Nice! And even after she hung up her cleats and sports bra, she’d come to the game and she’d bring her hot younger sister too.

All seemed well enough in the Tsunami region of SFuckingNABAland, one opening-round playoff loss seen as a sign of hope, of more playoffs to come, a beginning, certainly not an end. But then the dormant evil that lurked in some of the newest and unchecked Tsunami came out of the space behind their computer desks and revealed itself as Bay Socks. Yes, the horror! Multiple lotion-coated, semen-crusted Bay Socks dropped their Tsunami robes and revealed their true identities, leaving the side of good and light to form their own collection, the team now known forever in history as the Bay Sox.

And they did it like a week before the 2006 season, the cheesedicks.

At this point, gentle reader, I ask you to kindly fight any temptation towards sympathy. This is not a double-feature on Lifetime and it’s not a CBS Sunday Night Special. This was real life, and the real fucking Tsunami didn’t turtle, they regrouped the management, rebuilt the roster and reloaded the fun-cannon that they’d been spraying all over SFuckingNABAland for the past few seasons.